TheLadders Blog

AgileUX NYC 2012 — How to create great design experiences in an Agile development environment.

Saturday, February 25th from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM (ET)
School of Visual Arts Theater, 333 West 23 Street, New York NY 10011

This conference is for stakeholders, product managers and user experience designers passionate about building products that delight their customers, whether you work for a lean startup or a large organization. You’ll learn from the thought leaders in the AgileUX community about the entire lifecycle of software development, including:

• Organization and cultural change
• Team building
• Process design
• Customer research
• Design studios
• Transparent design
• User story writing
• Mid-stream rapid cadence usability testing
• Getting a seat at the table

TheLadders Director of User Experience Jeff Gothelf is no slouch — either at his work or at his desk.

Jeff, who oversees the look and feel of TheLadders online, likes to stay ahead of the latest innovations in how people interact with technology. That extends to the best way to occupy a workspace, as the Salt Lake City Tribune reported Friday.

Jeff recently responded to research into the health benefits of standing while working at your computer by raising his desk and spending his workdays at the helm. He told the Tribune he’s already noticed improvements: “I’m a lot more focused,” he told the paper. “I also do a lot more walking around, because it’s easier when you’re already standing to just walk over and talk to someone.”

While somebody has to be the trendsetter, Jeff wasn’t the only man standing for long in TheLadders office: Two of our colleagues have already adopted the vertical workstyle.

“They just sort of sprouted up like mushrooms,” Jeff told the Tribune.

Matthew Rothenberg is Editor-in-Chief of TheLadders and still writes from the comfort of a chair … at least for now!

There seem to be a lot of questions out there lately about what it’s like to work at TheLadders – especially on the product and technology teams. A recent photo of the company we sent to our members revealed that over 400 people work here. A significant chunk of that group works in product and technology. What do those people do? How do they work? Here are a few interesting insights that may help answer the question:

1. There are more than 30 people working on the Product team at TheLadders. Their focus is getting to the core of the conversation happening offline between job seekers and recruiters and translating it into a compelling online experience.
2. Of those 30 Product people, 13 work in User Experience. Yep, our UX team is bigger than most startups.
3. Nearly 60 people are in the technology organization. The work they do spans everything from front-end dev to database administration to CRM system maintenance.
4. We have three people focused on nothing but improving search functions. We affectionately refer to them as “Sergey”; “Larry”; and, um, one other name.
5. We’re an Agile shop. Have been for more than two years now. Like Brad Pitt in “The Devil’s Own,” we’re not going back (to waterfall).
6. We run six Scrum teams that are each focused on solving an explicit business problem.
7. Each Scrum team has at least one representative from each discipline – Product management, user experience, dev and QA.
8. Like most folks, we run two-week sprints. We tried to get it down to one week, but for us, that didn’t provide enough time to bring the awesome each sprint.
9. We have 0 cubicles in our space. Why? Because cubicle walls stifle conversation, which is the lifeblood of our innovation. So, yeah, it gets a little noisy, but it’s nothing Dr. Bose or Dr. Dre couldn’t help out with.

10. The products we create help nearly 5,000,000 people advance in their careers.

So what do all of these folks work on? We focus on collapsing the black hole that persists between job seekers and recruiters. Relevant, meaningful communications between these two groups produce quick hires. The more we can help initiate those conversations, the faster people get jobs. It’s not easy, though. Our data sets are in constant flux, the content in our systems is not standardized, and our user base is not familiar with the intricacies of a 21^st century job search. We work to overcome these challenges so that when the right person comes across the right job, it’s obvious to both parties. We work fast, test a lot of our ideas, fail quickly, learn and iterate  Eric Ries would be proud.

We learn a ton, and we share that knowledge. In the past year alone, TheLadders employees have spoken at SXSW, Startup 2011, Agile 2010 (and 2011 too) and countless local tech meetups. In fact, we host a lot of them in our Hudson St. office. It’s pretty inspiring to work with such smart folks every day.

If any of this sounds appealing to you, there’s good news: We’re hiring! Drop your resume in there and come solve problems, learn new things, and do some good.